Opinion

Are charities really helping themselves?

Fundraising | Chris Ingram | 1 Feb 2008

Trust fundraisers would appear not to want the money on offer from foundations by the lax way in which they conduct their business, says Chris Ingram. It’s supposed to be tough raising money for charities these days – and for many it is. But how often are charities helping themselves?

The Ingram Trust is a medium-sized grant aid charity. We try to help charities by telling them when we allocate funds and by describing the criteria, which are deliberately quite broad, and the sectors that interest us. We also tend to award grants on a three to four-year basis knowing this enables more security, better planning and lower fund-raising costs for the charities concerned. And of course, because we have no full-time staff, it helps minimise our own admin costs too. In return, we ask each charity we support to give us an annual progress report.

As we have spent more time in this market, we have been surprised at how many charities have failed to re-approach us when their funding ended.

Despite our annoyance at this, we decided to make the process easier by highlighting where we were in a funding schedule every time we sent a charity a cheque. Our covering letter says: “This is the first of three payments”, while perhaps more significantly the last letter says: “This is the third and final payment…”.

This autumn we sat down at the first of our twice-yearly meetings to review new applications and to look at those charities whose funding had finished in our last financial year.

To our huge frustration, four months into the new financial year, three of the five charities whose funding had ended had failed to make any fresh application for funds while one had applied for exactly the same amount, not even linking it to inflation. The last made a well-argued request, asking for 25 per cent more, which they got in two minutes flat.

The irony was that we had just decided to raise the maximum amount we would give by 50 per cent. Very few charities are aware of this because they haven’t asked. In fact, many show very little interest about how our funds are allocated. Out in the commercial world, good salespeople try to understand as much as possible about their prospects and the way they work. Not everyone will be forthcoming, of course, but the saying ‘if you don’t ask, you don’t get’ is absolutely correct.

On one occasion we asked a fundraiser why she had not asked for new funding once the three-year grant had ended, to which she replied: “The book tells us not to”.  We never learnt what this ‘book’ is but apparently it advises fundraisers not to ask because “trustees don’t like to be bothered”.

Bad practices such as these extend to the larger charities as well as much smaller ones. While we can sympathise with charities whose staff are massively over-stretched, it’s difficult to be sympathetic when our part-time administrator rings to find out if a charity has received our cheque, having had no acknowledgement. The answer was the fundraiser concerned had left, they weren’t sure if they had received the cheque and that they were behind on their acknowledgement letters. 

Exactly the same thing has happened with another small charity: the fundraiser had left but hadn’t been replaced and there was confusion about whether a cheque had been received, telling us: “We’ll get back to you”.

The responsibility to acknowledge a cheque should be transferred from the fundraiser to the accounts department who can send out a short acknowledgement slip. The glowing letter of thanks from the chief executive or whoever can then wait.

Do we have a responsibility as trustees to stuff money down charities’ throats even if they can’t be bothered to ask for it? Does this indicate inefficiencies in other departments? And if we’ve worked with a charity for a number of years and are confident they are doing a good job, should we penalise them just because the fundraising department is inefficient or at least dysfunctional?

More generally, given the increase in apparently bright young people who regard fundraising as a proper career, why is it so many charities cannot get the fundamentals like this right?

Chris Ingram is the founder of the Ingram Trust and vice president of Shelter

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